Divine Justice

St. Paisios of Mount Athos taught that God’s justice and mercy are not opposing attributes but inseparable aspects of His love. He spoke soberly about the afterlife – heaven, hell, and the particular judgment – while insisting that God’s desire to save is infinitely greater than the devil’s desire to destroy. His teaching on the fear of God, prayer for the departed, and hell as self-chosen separation from God reflects the Orthodox patristic tradition at its most balanced: neither sentimentally permissive nor harshly legalistic.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

God’s Justice and Mercy: How They Work Together

Not Opposition but Unity

St. Paisios taught that divine justice (dikaiosyne) and divine mercy (eleos) are not two competing attributes that God must balance against each other. They are two aspects of the same divine love. Far from being a celestial accountant balancing one against the other, the Elder insisted that God’s justice is itself an expression of His mercy and is wholly unlike the human justice that demands its fair share (a contrast developed at length below; see Divine Justice vs. Human Justice).

He rejected two common distortions:

The harsh God: The image of God as a stern accountant, tallying sins and dispensing punishments, keeping a ledger of debts that must be repaid. This image, which the Elder associated with a legalistic, juridical conception of God, distorts the Gospel and drives people to despair. As he put it, God “is not a tyrant who pesters and intimidates us”; He desires our free love, not the cringing of slaves (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 1: With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man).

The permissive God: The image of God as an indulgent grandfather who doesn’t care about sin, who accepts everything without distinction and demands nothing. This sentimental image, equally distorted, removes any urgency from repentance and trivializes the gravity of sin. “A doctor who tells you everything is fine when you have cancer is not merciful – he’s negligent.”

The Medical Model

Consistent with the broader Orthodox tradition, St. Paisios used the medical model to explain the relationship between justice and mercy. God’s “justice” in dealing with sin is like a doctor’s treatment of disease: it may involve painful interventions (suffering, correction, consequences), but the purpose is always healing, never punishment for its own sake:

Sin damages the soul the way disease damages the body.
The consequences of sin (suffering, estrangement, spiritual darkness) are not punishments imposed by an angry God but the natural results of spiritual illness.
God’s response to sin is therapeutic: He permits the consequences so that the person will recognize the disease and seek the cure (repentance).
God’s mercy is the physician’s compassion for the patient – infinite patience, tireless willingness to treat, and refusal to abandon even the most difficult case.

This teaching echoes St. Isaac the Syrian, whom St. Paisios loved and frequently cited (the Elder said that “studying Abba Isaac even just a little alters the soul” – orthochristian.com): “Do not call God just, for His justice is not known in the things concerning you… How can you call God just when you come across the Scriptural passage on the wage given to the workers?… Where, then, is God’s justice? – for whilst we were sinners Christ died for us!” (St. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, Homily 51 [Holy Transfiguration Monastery ed., p. 387]).

Justice as Truth

St. Paisios also understood divine justice in terms of truth (aletheia): God’s justice means that He sees things as they truly are. There is no deception, no illusion, no self-justification that survives the encounter with divine truth. At the same time, because God sees truly, He sees not only our sins but also our struggles, our intentions, our circumstances, and the degree of freedom with which we acted. As the Elder taught, God “takes into account the conditions in which each person lives” and “will ask of each one of us accordingly” – judging not the surface of an act but the heart behind it (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 1: With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man; cf. Vol. 5: Passions and Virtues, on God’s discernment in weighing each soul).

The Elder’s Best-Known Teaching on Justice

One of St. Paisios’s most beloved and frequently recounted teachings draws a sharp contrast between human justice and divine justice. It is preserved not in the Spiritual Counsels but in the early biography by his disciple, Hieromonk Christodoulos of the Holy Mountain, Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain (Holy Mountain, 1998). The Elder illustrated it with a homely example of two people dividing a quantity of fruit:

“Human justice is, let us say, when two people come to divide some apricots. They count them and divide them equally between the two of them, so that neither will wrong the other. But if one of them has divine justice and sees that the other likes apricots, he will pretend that he does not like them very much, and will eat only one or two, telling the other: ‘Brother, you eat the rest of the apricots, because I don’t really care for them; besides, my stomach is upset.’ He thus takes the smaller and worse share, out of love, so that his brother may be comforted” (St. Paisios, in Hieromonk Christodoulos, Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain; trans. as published at oodegr.com and orthodoxwitness.org [the fruit is variously rendered apricots, peaches, or walnuts across translations of the same passage]).

Human justice divides things equally so that no one is wronged. Divine justice goes beyond fairness: it willingly takes the smaller portion, the harder task, the lower place – not because it is owed, but out of love. The person with divine justice does not insist on his rights; he prefers to be wronged rather than to wrong, to lose rather than to let another suffer loss.

Accepting Injustice After the Pattern of Christ

The Elder extended the same principle from the sharing of goods to the bearing of injustice. He taught that the Christian with divine justice will accept even being wronged with joy:

“If someone comes and tells me, ‘Yeronda, this cell is mine, so get out and leave,’ if I possess divine justice I will accept it with joy and thank him… The true Christian must never condemn or take to court his fellow man, even when someone takes by force his clothes. Our Lord was the first one to apply divine justice. He did not find excuses for Himself when He was being accused, nor protest when people spat on Him…” (St. Paisios, in Hieromonk Christodoulos, Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain; as published at iconandlight.wordpress.com).

For St. Paisios, this was the very logic of the Cross. Christ, perfectly innocent, did not demand His rights or defend Himself before His accusers; He absorbed the injustice and answered it with love. The saints, the Elder said, lived by this same divine justice rather than by human justice – and this is precisely what set them apart from the merely fair-minded.

The Afterlife: Heaven, Hell, and the Particular Judgment

The Particular Judgment

St. Paisios taught that upon death, each soul faces the particular judgment – an encounter with God in which the truth of one’s life is revealed. He described this not as a courtroom scene with a judge behind a bench but as a moment of total transparency:

The soul sees itself as it truly is, in the light of God’s love – without the defenses, rationalizations, and illusions that protected it during earthly life.
For the righteous – those who loved God, repented of their sins, and oriented their lives toward Him – this revelation is joy: they see God face to face and recognize the love that sustained them.
For the unrepentant – those who rejected God, refused to repent, and oriented their lives toward themselves – this same revelation is agony: not because God punishes them, but because the truth of their self-chosen separation is unbearable.

On this view, God does not need to impose punishment from outside: when a person stands in the light of God and sees the truth of his own life, that revelation is itself the judgment – joy for those who loved God, anguish for those who turned from Him. (This is the Elder’s consistent emphasis; for the patristic root of the image, see St. Isaac the Syrian on the “scourge of love,” cited below.)

This teaching is consistent with the broader Orthodox understanding of the particular judgment as presented in the Orthodoxy Guide: Eschatology.

Heaven (Paradeisos)

St. Paisios taught that heaven is not a place of passive bliss or idle relaxation but the fullness of communion with God – the completion of theosis, the eternal participation in divine love and light:

In paradise, the Elder taught, the soul has everything because it has God, who is Himself the fullness of every good (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 1: With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man).
Heaven is the fulfillment of the relationship with God that begins in this life through prayer, the sacraments, and the struggle against the passions. It is not a reward imposed from outside but the natural completion of a life oriented toward God.
The joy of heaven is proportional to the soul’s capacity to receive God’s love – a capacity that is developed through the spiritual life on earth. This is why the ascetical struggle matters: it expands the soul’s capacity for eternal joy.

Hell (Kolasis)

Hell as Self-Chosen Separation

St. Paisios taught that hell is real but profoundly misunderstood by many. It is not a torture chamber designed by a vengeful God but a state of self-chosen separation from God:

In the Elder’s teaching, hell is not a punishment that God imposes but a separation that the soul chooses: God does not thrust anyone into hell; the unrepentant arrive there by refusing to repent, closing from the inside the door that God keeps open. This is the common Orthodox patristic understanding that St. Paisios shared, rather than a saying preserved in his own distinctive wording.

He drew on the patristic image, especially from St. Isaac the Syrian, that the same divine fire of God’s love is experienced as light and warmth by the righteous and as burning by the unrepentant – not because the fire is different but because the disposition of the soul is different. St. Isaac states it directly: “those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love… the power of love works in two ways: it torments sinners… and at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it” (St. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, Homily 28 [Holy Transfiguration Monastery ed., p. 266]). The familiar comparison – that the sun which warms the healthy man burns the man in fever, the difference lying not in the sun but in the condition of the one who receives it – is the popular Orthodox restatement of Isaac’s teaching that the Elder echoed.

God Does Not Desire Anyone’s Damnation

The Elder was emphatic that God does not desire anyone’s eternal separation: “God wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Hell exists not because God wants people there but because He respects human freedom – even the freedom to reject Him definitively:

As the Elder taught, God is omnipotent but “does not impose Himself forcefully on man”; He desires our free love, for love that is compelled is no longer love. Salvation cannot be forced upon the unwilling without destroying the very freedom that makes communion with God possible (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 1: With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man).

Hell and Apokatastasis

Note on the debate: The question of the eternity of hell vs. universal salvation (apokatastasis) is debated within Orthodox theology. Some theologians (following certain readings of St. Gregory of Nyssa and, more recently, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and David Bentley Hart) hold out the hope or even the expectation of universal salvation. Others (following the dominant patristic and conciliar tradition) affirm the real possibility of eternal damnation. St. Paisios did not enter this academic debate directly; his approach was pastoral. He spoke of hell’s reality to motivate the urgency of repentance while constantly emphasizing the infinitude of God’s mercy. His focus was on what the individual can do now – repent, pray, trust God – rather than on speculative questions about the final outcome. (No published statement of St. Paisios directly endorses or condemns apokatastasis; his teaching that memorial prayers can help the departed “until the Last Judgment, after which there is no more help” – Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4: Family Life – implies a non-universalist stance, but he did not address the question as such.)

The Toll-Houses (Telonia)

St. Paisios’s Treatment

The concept of aerial toll-houses (telonia / mytarstva) – stations through which the soul passes after death, encountering demonic accusation at each one – is part of Orthodox theological tradition, though its status is debated (see Orthodoxy Guide: Eschatology and Fr. Seraphim Rose: Aerial Realm for detailed treatment).

St. Paisios did refer to the toll-houses, though without elaborating a detailed schema of named stations. In Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4: Family Life, he teaches: “When a soul is well prepared and ascending to Heaven, the demons can’t assault it. If it isn’t prepared, it is tormented by the demons.” He adds that “sometimes, God may allow a soul with unpaid debts at the time of their death to see the toll houses, so that we, who will continue to live, struggle to repay our debts here” (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4: Family Life; trans. johnsanidopoulos.com).

His emphasis, however, fell on practical preparedness – repentance, confession, the sacraments, and prayer – rather than on the mechanics of the post-mortem journey:

He taught that the best preparation for whatever the soul encounters after death is a life of repentance and faith.
He emphasized the power of the Church’s prayers and the sacraments to protect the soul in the hour of death and beyond.
He affirmed the reality of demonic opposition to the soul, consistent with the broader Orthodox tradition, without elaborating a detailed toll-house schema.

The Elder’s approach was consistent with the pastoral spirit of the toll-house tradition: its purpose is not to terrify but to motivate vigilance, repentance, and reliance on God’s mercy and the Church’s prayers.

Prayer for the Departed

The Communion of Love Beyond Death

St. Paisios strongly affirmed and encouraged prayer for the departed, teaching that love does not end at death and that the living can genuinely help the dead through prayer:

Love is not severed by death: if you love someone, the Elder taught, you should pray for him whether he is living or departed, for “death does not separate us” – our prayer genuinely reaches and helps the one for whom we pray (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4: Family Life; trans. johnsanidopoulos.com).
He taught that the Divine Liturgy is the most powerful prayer for the departed – the commemoration of names during the Proskomedia (preparation of the Eucharistic bread), the memorial services (mnemosyna), and the offering of kollyva (boiled wheat).
He encouraged families to have the Psalter read for their departed loved ones, to offer liturgies for them, and to give alms in their memory.
He taught that the Church’s prayers can genuinely improve the condition of the departed soul in the intermediate state between death and the Last Judgment – consistent with the Orthodox teaching that the particular judgment is provisional, not final (see Seraphim Rose: Prayers for the Departed).

Experiences of the Departed

St. Paisios reportedly spoke of experiences in which the departed communicated their gratitude for prayers or their need for further prayer. He was careful to distinguish such experiences from spiritualist or occult practices, which he firmly condemned:

Contact with the departed is not something Christians should seek or cultivate through seances, mediums, or occult practices.
When God permits awareness of the departed’s state, it is always for the purpose of encouraging prayer and love – never for idle curiosity or entertainment.
The proper Christian response to awareness of a departed loved one’s need is prayer – liturgical commemoration, memorial services, almsgiving, and personal intercession.

(St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4: Family Life, which gathers his counsels on death, the departed, and the toll-houses; cf. Hieromonk Isaac, Elder Paisios of Mount Athos.)

The Fear of God as Reverence, Not Terror

The Nature of the Fear of God

St. Paisios taught about the fear of God (fovos Theou) with precision, distinguishing it sharply from the kind of terror that drives people away from God:

For the Elder, the fear of God is not the dread one feels before a wild beast but reverence (evlavia) – the awe and spiritual sensitivity that fills the soul standing before Someone infinitely holy, good, and loving. It is the loving fear of a child who dreads grieving a beloved parent, not the cringing fear of a slave who dreads a beating. St. Paisios closely linked the fear of God with reverence and with spiritual sensitivity, treating the two as inseparable marks of a soul rightly disposed toward God (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 2: Spiritual Awakening, which contains his counsels on reverence and the fear of God).

Stages of the Fear of God

The patristic tradition that St. Paisios inherited recognizes stages in the development of the fear of God. The classic threefold scheme – slavish, mercenary, and filial fear – is articulated above all by St. Basil the Great (On Psalm 33) and Abba Dorotheos of Gaza (Discourses IV, “On the Fear of God”), and echoed by St. Maximus and St. John Climacus; St. Paisios’s own teaching on reverence presupposes this inheritance rather than originating the schema:

Slavish fear (doulikos fovos): The fear of punishment – the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). This is appropriate for beginners in the spiritual life, for those who are just turning from sin. It is a legitimate and necessary starting point, but it is not the goal.
Mercenary fear (misthios fovos): The fear of losing rewards – serving God for the sake of heavenly benefits rather than from love. This is an intermediate stage, better than slavish fear but still self-centered.
Filial fear (yiikos fovos): The fear of the mature child – the fear of grieving a beloved Father, born not from terror but from love. This is the proper Christian fear of God: “I don’t want to sin, not because I’m afraid of hell, but because I love God and don’t want to wound our relationship.”

St. Paisios taught that as love grows, slavish fear gives way to filial love, but reverence remains even at the highest levels of spiritual maturity. The saints, who love God most deeply, also revere Him most profoundly. As Abba Dorotheos – whom the Elder followed on this point – expresses it, “He who fears God fears nothing”; the soul that truly fears (that is, reveres) God is set free from every other fear (Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses IV, “On the Fear of God”).

Fear and Love in Balance

The Elder warned against two errors:

Fear without love: This produces servile religion – obedience from terror, which is spiritually crippling and eventually leads to resentment or despair.
Love without fear: This produces presumption – a casual, familiar attitude toward God that lacks reverence and leads to spiritual laxity. Some people, the Elder warned, grow so comfortable with God that they forget who He is; we are to approach Him with both love and awe, for the God who is love is also holy and infinite (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 2: Spiritual Awakening, on reverence).

Living in Light of Eternity

Remembrance of Death

The practical consequence of St. Paisios’s teaching on divine justice and the afterlife was not morbid preoccupation with death but a vivid awareness of eternity that shapes how we live now:

“Remember death – not to become depressed but to put everything in perspective. When you remember that this life is temporary, you stop clinging to things that don’t matter and start investing in things that last forever” (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 3; cf. Sirach 7:36; St. John Climacus, Ladder, Step 6).

This awareness produces both:

Urgency: Don’t waste time. Repent now. Love now. Pray now. Tomorrow may not come.
Peace: The sufferings of this life are temporary. What awaits the faithful is eternal joy. The Elder taught that the one who keeps death before his eyes and remembers it daily struggles harder, defeats vanity, and at last “awaits death with joy,” because this brief life is nothing beside the eternity that awaits us (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4: Family Life, on death and the remembrance of death).

The Practical Life of Eternity-Mindedness

The Elder taught that awareness of eternity should not make a person otherworldly in a dysfunctional sense but should rather make them more fully present, more loving, and more serious about their responsibilities:

Treat every encounter as significant – you may not have another chance to show love to this person.
Do not postpone repentance – the time is always now.
Do not accumulate possessions – they will not accompany you beyond the grave.
Invest in relationships, prayer, charity, and spiritual growth – these are the only things that endure.

References

St. Paisios of Mount Athos. Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 1: With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man. Souroti, Thessaloniki: Hesychasterion of St. John the Theologian.
St. Paisios of Mount Athos. Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 2: Spiritual Awakening. Souroti, Thessaloniki: Hesychasterion of St. John the Theologian.
St. Paisios of Mount Athos. Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4: Family Life. Souroti, Thessaloniki: Hesychasterion of St. John the Theologian. (Source of the Elder’s counsels on death, prayer for the departed, and the toll-houses; quotations as translated at johnsanidopoulos.com.)
St. Paisios of Mount Athos. Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 5: Passions and Virtues. Souroti, Thessaloniki: Hesychasterion of St. John the Theologian.
Christodoulos, Hieromonk (Hagiorite). Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain. Holy Mountain (Mount Athos), 1998. (Source of the “human justice vs. divine justice” / dividing-the-fruit teaching; English as published at oodegr.com and orthodoxwitness.org.)
Hieromonk Isaac. Elder Paisios of Mount Athos. Chalkidiki: Holy Monastery of St. John the Theologian, 2012.
Isaac the Syrian. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984 (Homily 28, p. 266, on the “scourge of love”; Homily 51, p. 387, “Do not call God just”).
Basil the Great. Homily on Psalm 33 (on the slavish, mercenary, and filial fear of God).
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. 7th century.
Maximus the Confessor. Centuries on Love; Quaestiones ad Thalassium. 7th century.
Dorotheos of Gaza. Discourses and Sayings, Discourse IV: “On the Fear of God.” 6th century.
Rose, Seraphim. The Soul After Death. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1980.
Pomazansky, Michael. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1984.